Riley's Mistake
by Ivy Gort
Summary: Completed! Written before HUSH aired. Riley makes a mistake that almost costs both his and Buffy's life. Completed!


Author: Ivy Gort Ivy@xenacon.com   
Feedback: Please. Ivy@xenacon.com   
Disclaimer: I do not claim ownership of this fiction or the characters   
portrayed in this fiction.   
  
This was written before HUSH aired.   
  
  
The Journal of Riley Finn; Special Agent   
  
Mistake: 1: A wrong judgment: Misunderstanding. 2: A wrong action or   
statement or error.   
  
God did I really make a big MISTAKE tonight. I nearly got the girl, oops, I   
mean the woman, I'm going to marry, killed.   
  
I never used to make mistakes; I was All-State in basketball in High School   
and that got me a full ride at Wake Forest. I was never the best athlete on   
the team but I always worked hard and applied myself and got the job done.   
That was why I, at 23, was put in charge of the military aspect of the Initiative.   
  
But then I met Buffy Summers. I mean what kind of a name is Buffy? I keep   
thinking I'm going to hear all about Buffy and Muffy going to Daddy's Formal. Just like all those shallow girls at Wake Forest-the Southern Belle syndrome I called it.   
  
But I digress. See? See what I mean? I look back at my other journal entries and they are concise and to the point; none of this meandering like the Mississippi does near Grandma's farm. I wonder what she would think of Buffy?   
  
Oh, man; come on Finn, focus. No, I really don't want to focus on tonight-or this morning-because then I would have to admit just how close my screw-up came to costing Buffy her life.   
  
Upon review of the videotapes of Hostile 17 we discovered the legend of The Slayer. We were able to obtain very little information about the legend considering Hostile 17 vanished and its accomplice was immediately terminated on capture. But, Walsh ordered surveillance of all possible female athletes on campus just in case. Little did I know that the mythical Slayer was my date to Saturday night's party? I mean she's so tiny....   
  
Oh, God, I remember carrying her lithe form into that death trap. Okay, I can't put it off any longer: I must release some of this guilt and penned up rage, no fear, at what happened.   
  
Sunnydale. Two nights ago everyone in the city of Sunnydale lost his or her voices. As an experiment people were sent beyond the city limits and they regained their ability to speak. So we locked the town down. Sent things over the news wire about a virus that caused voice loss and lasts a few days. It was epidemic in Sunnydale blah, blah, blah.   
  
Then the police discovered the first of the bodies, so a curfew was imposed.   
The Agents from the Initiative were to patrol the streets until we could discover and capture the demon responsible for silencing an entire city.   
  
The fact that it was also a brutal murderer was secondary-the military could use such a powerful weapon-think of its applications. I'm delaying again, aren't I?   
  
Last night we were on routine patrol when Forest spotted Buffy walking down Elm Street. Just walking down it like she owned the damn street! We had to stop her. I thought what a stupid little girl; maybe she was just like those airheads at Wake? Maybe there was actually no puzzle to her at all? Sunnydale was not the place for anyone to be out alone after dark, especially not a small woman.   
  
Forest and Graham stayed in the bushes while I confronted her. Did I mention I had my mask on? Standard procedure when confronting civilians. I pulled the big macho army guy on her and tried to get her to leave and go home. But she wouldn't, she just kept right on walking totally ignoring me-so I grabbed her arm. And the next thing I knew I was flying head over heels down the street. So Graham jumps out and wraps her up in a bear hug-poor guy-I hope his nose heals okay.   
  
Anyway, by then I'm back up and she swings at me. I could tell it was only half-hearted that she didn't really want to hurt me, so I blocked it and twisted her arm behind her back. Under normal conditions, I should have been able to cuff her and control her, but through brute strength she pulled her arm out of my hold. I couldn't believe a girl who weighs less then a hundred pounds overpowered me! Then she reverses her body somehow delivering the most crunching punch to my jaw I had ever felt. I went down like a sack of grain.   
  
I think I blacked out for a second or two because the next thing I saw was the Taser line flying out of the bushes and hitting Buffy in the back. She went rigid for a moment as the electricity coursed through her and then she just folded, falling to the ground.   
  
Forest kept the line taught until I was able to regain my senses. As I stood I realized the situation; a girl less than a hundred pounds had just trashed two highly trained and combat skilled men over twice her size, she couldn't be human. My mind cried out in anguish.   
  
I let my training take over at that point. I picked up my weapon from where   
I had dropped it at the beginning of the encounter, put a round in the chamber and covered the demon. Forest sent another shock down the line, to totally incapacitate her. (Once again standard procedure) He checked on Graham but he waved him off-he wanted to know what kind of demon my girlfriend was as much I did.   
  
So Forest went and kneeled by my supposedly human girlfriend and pulled out the testing kit. The first thing he did was check to see if she was conscious. The voltage we use knocks out humans. While, demons, with their weird nervous systems, are just stunned. He looked back at me and nodded, that yes she was unconscious. At that point a little bit of hope began to creep into my mind against my wishes.   
  
The next test was to check her pulse. I sweated as he touched his fingers to her neck.... Again, he looked back at me, nodding. I could see the slight smile starting at the corners of his mouth though the mask. He pulled out he computerized thermometer and stuck it in her ear, then held it up so I could see the results. 99.6. Most demons had a low body temperature-Buffy's was high-but in the normal range. I began to breathe again, as Forest took out the blood test. He picked up her limp hand and pricked the middle finger. He let a drop or two fall into the compartment of the hand held computer. The thirty seconds it took to process the blood seemed like hours. Finally, the light went off indicating that the results were in. I could tell from Forest's eyes before he stood up and brought the printout to me-Buffy was human.   
  
I stood down. I ejected the round out of the chamber of my weapon. Forest disconnected the Taser line from her back as the three of us looked at each other, confused. We really didn't want to turn my girlfriend over to the police, but a kung-fu fighter or not, we couldn't just let her wander around Sunnydale. Her hand jerked slightly. That was the first sign of that she was regaining consciousness, so we had to decide what to do with her quickly. Oh, god I wish we would have signaled the police to come get her.   
  
Graham pointed at the abandoned house we had just swept for hostiles. It was a two-story number with an old clock tower. Then Forest produced a pair of standard issue police handcuffs. Not the kind we use, ours are much stronger, lighter, and we can cuff a hostile with them much faster. Which, looking back on it, using the police issue handcuffs probably saved our lives.   
  
Graham suddenly sat down. I noticed that his mask was covered in blood from his broken nose. So I motioned to Forest to help him and to signal for a vehicle to transport him to the hospital. I glanced back at Buffy, her hand was moving and she was trying to use it to push up. Forest taped me lightly on the shoulder and when I turned around, he pointed to her and then to the house. Guilty, I checked on Graham who playfully pushed me towards my girlfriend. I gave in to my friend's wishes to go to her. That was when I saw the bag she had strapped over one shoulder. I didn't think much about it; she was always carrying one. I just figured she always had books in them.... This one was different than the other ones she usually used, though, it was an old-fashioned style-definitely not Buffy. To pick her up I needed to take it off of her, but as I'm sitting her up to slip it over her head I find out that the damn thing weighed a ton. I heard the evac truck in the background so I really didn't have time to deal with it. I just put it over my shoulder and reached down to pick her up.   
  
When I picked her up, her eyes briefly fluttered open but closed again almost immediately. I watched her face as I carried her, I couldn't help myself, she was just so beautiful. And her face was so completely different with those huge expressive green eyes closed. The difference shocked me. I wasn't expecting it. I'd only seen her when she was awake and aware of everything. Her appearance changed from that of a competent woman to that of a young girl-the years seemingly falling away. That was when I realized that it was her eyes that made her look older than she actually was, it was her eyes that were old, not her. Gosh, reading what I just wrote it sounds so corny, like one of those old movies, but it's true.   
  
As I said before she was so light it wasn't hard to carry her to the abandoned house. When I got there I decided to put her in the clock tower and lock the door. On the way up there I thought there was very little chance that anything could find her before I could change into my civilian uniform of jeans and a tee-shirt and get back. She was really beginning to wake up by the time I started up the steps-but she still wasn't aware of her surroundings. The electrical shock from the taser tends to confuse and disorient humans for some time. Since Buffy had received two separate charges, I knew it could be hours before she fully recovered her senses. I didn't realize at the time that the fact that she was even conscious was unusual, as I say I was too busy thinking with my hormones instead of my head.   
  
On the first landing I started watching her face, again-so many different emotions were washing over it-it was amazing. I finally realized that she had started to cry while listening to my heart beat, big fat tears leaking out from under her closed eyes. She had placed her tiny hand, still clumsy from the taser, flat against my chest, and then she replaced her hand with her ear. It was like she needed to hear it beat, needed to hear every little noise it made--the girl is so strange and such a puzzle!   
  
When I reached the clock tower I noticed a desk next to a slatted window. There was some kind of pipe running up the wall behind it so I just laid Buffy on the desk and handcuffed her hands behind her back to it. Confident that she was stuck there until I could get back and take her safely home, I turned to leave....   
  
The next few minutes happened in a total blur. I remember turning away from Buffy and seeing a green mist appear on the stairs. I pulled my weapon and chambered a round then went out into the hall to investigate it. But before I could reach the stairs to the clock tower the green mist resolved itself into two really weird looking demons. They were dressed all in black, like the preachers from the 18th century, and had humanoid features. Except their faces were like something out of a nightmare. They were floating, not walking, and they were green-but besides that they looked human. I heard a noise behind me and I somehow knew that Buffy was completely aware of the situation.   
  
All my orders about trying to capture the beasts flew out of my head as I was faced with the dilemma of having my girlfriend bound and semi-conscious behind me. I opened up on full-automatic, thanking god that the silencer was cutting down on at least some of the noise from my weapon. The bullets hit the demons in a closed pattern, right in their chests. If they had been humans they would have been killed instantly-as it was they were slowed-but not stopped. I heard the door downstairs bang open and two sets of heavy booted feet pound up the first flight of stairs.   
  
But by then the demons were on top of me. My weapon was ripped out of my hands, Buffy's bag was thrown across the floor, and I was being pulled into the clock tower. As soon I cleared the door, it slammed shut. Seconds later Forest and Graham started pounding on it, to no avail.   
  
One of the demons had pinned my legs to the floor by sitting on them, the other demon grabbed my hands and effortlessly pulled my arms over my head; I was held totally helpless. I don't know why but the demon by my head pulled off my mask and I looked over at Buffy to say good bye. I expected to see accusation, hurt, horror, on her expressive face, instead I saw cold determination. Sure, I knew she was surprised it was I, lying there, about to become demon kibble, but her eyes, were the frozen eyes of a predator.   
  
I kept watching her as I felt the demon sitting on my legs began to use his elongated claws to rip my sweater open. I watched her, I had seen the photos of the crime scenes of the other victims, I knew what was coming and I wanted her face to be the last thing I saw. I watched as she tried to break the handcuffs by pulling on them. She seemed slightly confused when they wouldn't give. Then she pulled her legs up on to the edge desk and used them to push forward. I could hear the pipe groaning behind her and then she was lying face down on the floor next to me. The chain to the cuffs had broken and she was free.   
  
A moment later I didn't care; the demons claws ripped into my stomach and my mind was filled with pain. I felt the weight of the demon on my legs being pulled off and I looked up to see Buffy twisting its neck, cleanly breaking it. It fell on top of me, some of its green blood burning into my wound. The other demon, the one that was holding my hands, released me and launched itself at Buffy, pushing both of them through the slats on the window and down to the roof of the porch below.   
  
I painfully pushed the dead demon off of me as Forest and Graham were finally able to open the door and rush into the room. They had their weapons ready as they looked at me; I motioned them to help me to the window. I had to see the fight I could hear raging below. The three of us stared in amazement as Buffy, balanced on the steep roof of the porch, rained blow after blow, kick after kick down on the demon until it couldn't move. When she had beaten it senseless she killed it by snapping its neck.   
  
The moon took that exact moment to appear from behind the clouds and shine brightly down on her golden hair-highlighting her as if she were some avenging Goddess standing over her prey. She quirked a smile at us, and then jumped the 20 feet to the ground, running off as the evac truck pulled up and a team of medics rushed up to the house.   
  
I passed out and woke up, here, in quarantine. So far the demon's blood hasn't affected me, but we can't be too safe. My wound is healing and in another week if I show no signs of demon infection I will be released back to active duty. Walsh will want my report of the action by then. I don't know what to tell her, I don't know if I should tell her that the legendary Slayer is none other than that tiny girl in her Freshman Psychology class. Would she even believe me? Graham and Forest didn't see everything I did, they think she just knows a little Kung Fu-they didn't see her break the handcuffs and snap the first demon's neck. They think I killed the first demon and wounded the second one. The big thing, though, was that they never saw her eyes. Those cold hunter's eyes that I saw-so do I tell Walsh all about Buffy, The Slayer, or not?   
  
  
  



End file.
